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Friday Apr 19, 2019 / Doors: 7:00 PM / Show: 8:00 PM
All Ages
$18 Advance / $20 Day of Show
This is a seated show. General Admission tickets are available online, by phone, Electric Fetus, and The Cedar during shows.

DAVID HUCKFELT

In the fall of 2017, David Huckfelt left behind the familiar—the comfort of his home in Minneapolis; the camaraderie of his critically acclaimed band, The Pines; the luxuries of heat, hot water, and electricity—and relocated to Isle Royale, America’s most remote and least visited national park in mighty Lake Superior. Six hours by boat off the Michigan coast, Isle Royale is the largest island in the world’s largest freshwater lake, an isolated stretch of wilderness seemingly forgotten by the 20th century (to say nothing of the 21st). There, as an Artist In Residence selected by the National Park Service, Huckfelt spent ten hours a day for two straight weeks writing in solitude, channeling the mysterious and lonesome island’s spirits into his stunning debut solo album, Stranger Angels, slated to release Feb 22nd, 2019.

“The island is surrounded by 300 smaller islands, decrepit lighthouses and abandoned mines, lined with shipwrecks, ghosts, and the stories of the northern Ojibway, fisherman, and early settlers,” Huckfelt reflects. “I brought a mountain of notebooks and poetry and history books with me”, says Huckfelt, “and for the first time in nearly a decade, I found the solitude, depth, range, danger, beauty, and inspiration to go all kinds of places in my writing that I hadn't had the space to visit before. With a sense of place so strong, it was less like an anchor and more like a launching pad to free up and access all kinds of places from throughout my life. It’s easy to travel anywhere in your mind in that kind of solitude, your whole experience rises up from the deep.”

Indeed, the music is both transportive and reflective, focused inwards even as it draws on an abundance of outside influence. Hypnotic banjo and gentle acoustic guitar meet trippy public domain samples and shimmering soundscapes underneath Huckfelt’s stark, raw vocals as he wrestles with questions of fate and faith, responsibility and independence, connection and loss. A thread of deep ecology runs through these songs, but not the cute bumper sticker kind, the gritty, “what-comes-next-if-we-don’t-change-our-ways” kind. “Isle Royale used to have fifty wolves in five packs…” Huckfelt says, “now there’s only one left. Cycles are cycles but it’s the height of pride to think we (humans) aren’t the major player.” The title track “Stranger Angels” brings this point home strongest, with the narrator longing for a place “where (he) won’t make the greedy richer”, and the fierce grip of climate change manifests in lyrics like “Wild mustangs starve in the hills outside Las Vegas… and the West is burning like a lake of fire.”

But above and beyond conservation, Stranger Angels is a record about “thin places”, those spiritually charged places where heaven and earth seem to meet and the veil between the world we see and the mystical world beyond becomes transparent. On the rollicking blues-carnival track “As Below, So Above” Huckfelt pays a touching tribute to his late grandmother who helped raise him in Iowa, not by writing about her, but to her, as a defiant elegy against death. A former theology student who once wrote and preached sermons in Cook County Jail in Chicago, Huckfelt has gone through the fire of the niceties and dogma of “heaven” and “god” and come out the other end with a worldview fiercely present, concrete and expansive. “Stranger Angels as a title, to me, has a thousand references to what’s left after life and death and experience and loss and love burns off all the easy answers…” says Huckfelt. “The idea of god or spirit being hidden under the opposite of what we think we know, of ancestors and spirits visiting us, screaming in our ears all day long, but we miss it because it’s different, stranger than we expected… And the kindness we give and receive from strangers, the least, last and lost among us. Our cities are overflowing with strange angels, it’s such a mistake when we think we know which or who can offer us something, and which can’t. Every spirit has something to give. Then, when I saw the night camera footage of the moose and wolves on Isle Royale, dancing in the moonlight and gracing the forest with their presence, I thought “stranger angels” indeed.”

MICHAEL ROSSETTO

As the son of Italian immigrants living in the midwest, it is surprising that a banjo found its way into the hands of Michael Rossetto. As a self taught banjoist and guitarist, Rossetto moved from Wisconsin to the Twin Cities in ‘97 and began writing and recording instrumental music with his quartet, Spaghetti Western String Co. After four records, two MN Music Awards (2005, 2006) and a handful of silent film score performances, the group disbanded in 2010.

He spent the last several years working as a sideman for The Pines, David Huckfelt, Pieta Brown, Frankie Lee, Erik Koskinen and Buffalo Gospel.

In 2015 he began recording what would become Intermodal Blues, a collection of instrumental music that is a homage to the global music well that Rossetto draws inspiration from. Intermodal Blues was produced by Twin Cities drummer/percussionist, JT Bates along with Chris Bates (bass) and Jim Anton (doshpuluur). The collection of songs are heavily influenced by Rossetto's travels to his parents’ villages in Italy, the deserts of north western India and the winter back roads in the Midwest. Intermodal Blues will be released on Minneapolis jazz/improv label, Shifting Paradigm Records in February 2019.

DAVE SIMONETT

Dave Simonett sings, plays guitar and writes songs for the acoustic band Trampled by Turtles and Dead Man Winter is his electric rock & roll band featuring a cast of talented musicians that happen to be dear friends. Simonett will open the evening with a short, acoustic, solo set.